Seneca Village
Seneca Village was a 19th-century settlement of mostly African American landowners in the borough of Manhattan in New York City, within what would become present-day Central Park.
The origin of Seneca Village's name is obscure, and was only recorded by Thomas McClure Peters, rector of St. Michael's Episcopal Church;[1] however, a number of theories have been advanced.
[11] The previous landowner before African American settlement was a white farmer named John Whitehead, who purchased his property in 1824.
On September 27, 1825, a 25-year-old African American man named Andrew Williams, employed as a bootblack and later as a cartman, purchased three lots from the Whiteheads for $125.
[13][4][15][17] Additional nearby development was centered around "York Hill", a plot bounded by where Sixth and Seventh Avenues would have been built, between 79th and 86th Streets.
York Hill was mostly owned by the city, but 5 acres (2.0 ha) were purchased by William Matthews, a young African American, in the late 1830s.
[9] Richard Croker, who later became the leader of Tammany, was born in Ireland, but he came with his family to Seneca Village in 1846, and lived there until his father received a job that enabled them to move.
[21] Many residents boarded in homes they did not own, demonstrating that there was significant class stratification even with Seneca Village's high land ownership rate.
[25] The AME Zion Church, a denomination officially established in lower Manhattan in 1821, owned property for burials in Seneca Village beginning in 1827.
The congregation was racially diverse, with Black and German Protestant[38] parishioners from Seneca Village and nearby areas.
[41][42] While Seneca Village was the largest former settlement in what is now Central Park, it was also surrounded by smaller areas that were occupied mainly by Irish and German immigrants.
[43][44] One of these areas, called "Pigtown", was a settlement of 14 mostly Irish families located in the modern park's southeastern corner, and was so named because the residents kept hogs and goats.
[43] Pigtown was originally located farther south, from Sixth to Seventh Avenues somewhere within the "50s"-numbered streets, but was forced northward because of complaints about the pungent animal smells.
[47] There were also two German settlements: one at the modern-day park's northern end and one south of the current Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir.
That corner contains McGowan's Pass, a topological feature that was the site of a Hessian encampment during the American Revolutionary War, and Blockhouse No.
Two of the primary proponents were William Cullen Bryant, the editor of the New York Evening Post, and Andrew Jackson Downing, one of the first American landscape designers.
[53]: 452–453 [55] Following the passage of an 1851 bill to acquire Jones's Wood, the Schermerhorns and Joneses successfully obtained an injunction to block the acquisition, and the transaction was invalidated as unconstitutional.
[60][61] In the years prior to the acquisition of Central Park, the Seneca Village community was referred to in pejorative terms,[27] including racial slurs.
[65] The Central Park commissioners had completed their assessments by July 1855, and the New York State Supreme Court confirmed this work the following February.
[70] A newspaper account at the time suggested that Seneca Village would "not be forgotten ... [as] many a brilliant and stirring fight was had during the campaign.
[72] The only institution from Seneca Village to survive was All Angels' Church, which relocated a couple of blocks away, albeit with an entirely new congregation[40] except for one person.
[40] As workers were uprooting trees at the corner of 85th Street and Central Park West in 1871, they came upon two coffins, both containing Black people from Seneca Village.
It came to the attention of Peter Salwen in the late 1970s, who noted a discrepancy in city maps of the village's impressive architecture that belied its negative reputation, and he included it in his 1989 Upper West Side Story.
[78] The historical example of Seneca Village has been cited in the context of racialized community displacement and more recent urban renewal initiatives.
[82] It is dedicated to raising awareness about Seneca Village's significance as a free, middle-class Black community in 19th-century New York City.
[80] In February 2001, former Parks Commissioner Henry Stern, State Senator David Paterson, Borough President C. Virginia Fields, and New York Historical Society Executive Director Betsy Gotbaum unveiled a plaque commemorating the site where Seneca Village once stood.
[13] In June 2000, Wall, Rothschild, Copeland, and other researchers started performing imaging tests to determine if any traces of Seneca Village remained.
Archaeologists filled over 250 bags with artifacts, including the bone handle of a toothbrush and the leather sole of a child's shoe.
[19][94][96] In 2020, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission launched an online exhibit, Seneca Village Unearthed, with around 300 artifacts from the 2011 excavation.
[101] The period room in the exhibit recreates the house of a fictional Seneca Village resident as it may have existed at the time, but also how their descendants may have lived in the present and future, as if the settlement had not been destroyed.
